Thursday, May 08, 2008

Israel's 60th birthday

David Seaton's News LinksI have written a lot about Israel since I began this blog.

I lived there for nearly a year as a young man and had a very good love there and all the good experiences and memories that go with that.

I don't consider myself an "expert" on that country, only someone who loved the place very much... not all the zionut, but the smell of the Tel-Aviv seafront early on a spring morning, my Israeli girlfriend sleeping in my arms, the sweetness of life.

In coming to consciousness politically, I am someone who has gone from being very, very, pro-Israel to very anti-Israel and this saddens me more than a little.

I am not kidding myself into thinking that being anti-Israel and anti its influence on American politics is going to be interpreted by most Jewish people as anything other than antisemitism and that saddens me even more.

My stepfather was a pianist of concert caliber, a doctor of music with degrees from Standford, Harvard and the Eastman School of Music, he had studied composition with Schoenberg and later was one of the pioneers of musical therapy for the mentally ill. In our living room there was a Steinway, concert grand.

Since we had the piano, when I was a boy, practically every weekend there was chamber music in our house. The participants were either string players from the Chicago symphony or psychiatrists: It isn't exactly ethnic profiling to note a high incidence of Jewish people among psychiatrists and string players. They brought their children with them and those were the children I played with every weekend.

As I turn the question of Israel around in my mind I feel that something precious to me has been tainted. DS